Tuesday, November 25, 2003

LOOKING FORWARD to the Macy's Day Parade? Well, what the heck is Macy's Day? It's the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, of course, but that odd common error has been published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cox News Service, the Jupiter (Fla.) Courier, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Florida Today, the Palm Beach Post, the Tampa Tribune, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times, among others, and that's just this year.

SPEAKING OF ODD COMMON ERRORS, "Indira Ghandi" appears in the current issue of Washingtonian magazine. Indira, Mohandas and Rajiv, of course, shared the name Gandhi.

VICIOUS CIRCLE is the preferred form of the expression, not "vicious cycle."

IT'S THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN. For, not of. My newspaper recently committed that error.

MY NEWSPAPER also recently mentioned a "hot dog-eating contest." Now, how hot could a dog-eating contest be? What the Post meant was a hot-dog-eating contest.

"FREE" means "for nothing." So "for free" means "for for nothing."

SPEAKING OF "FREE," in an odd and uncommon error, I recently read about somebody being home-free. The expression, assuming you don't mean homeless, is "home free."